The Mac Admin's Blog

Once you delete the item (files/ folder) it is moved to Trash bin. Now if you want to delete those items permanently, you can click Secure Trash in the latest version of Mac i.e. Snow Leopard. In the earlier versions of Mac OS X, this feature was termed as Empty Trash. Its the same process that you do by when you select Empty Recycle Bin on a Windows Operating System. The purpose of this post is to focus on how safe your data is, once you delete is permanently from your machine. As we all are aware of the data recovery methods available in the world of IT today where you can use third party utilities and recover the data even after it is deleted from the machine. Taking this into consideration, the security of your deleted data is too low which might cause loss of business or integrity. In order to tackle this, Apple has added a feature of 7-Pass Erase using which you can securely delete the data from the machine. In this process, it writes random data on the hard drive and dele

How to display Trash as stack This tip could be of great advantage for some users while managing the files and folders on your Mac. Using this you can make your Trash items displayed in Grid, List or Fan format. All you have to do is, open Goto Folder screen by pressing Command+Shift+G or in the Finder window, click Go and then Go to Folder. On this screen type ~/.Trash and it will open the Trash folder. All you have to do is drag this folder to your doc and it will accept it as stacks. Just like other folders you can change the display mode of the folder to Grid, Fan or List format. Isn't it really cool.

Unable to trash/delete items Sometimes you might face the issue that you are unable to delete items on your Mac. If this happens the reason would be in right on that file which means the permission assigned to your id is 'Read only'. All you have to do is, change the permissions and you will be able to delete/trash the file. The steps are: 1. Open 'Get info' of the selected file by pressing Command+I in combination. 2. In this window, where the option Sharing & Permissions is mentioned, expand it and change the rights from drop down menu. 3. Once done reopen try to trash it and will be deleted. This could be done only if you have made changes in the rights or you are admin on the Mac machine. This will surely resolve the issue of being unable to move items to Trash.